A
MAN ' S thinking can best be understood when one knows the the problem on
which he has been working throughout his mature years. My intellectual life
has been focused on a single problem. Every significant influence which has
played upon me has been directed to this inquiry. The problem which has en­gaged
me for the past fifty years can be put in the form of a question: What operates
in human life with such character and power that it will transform man as
he cannot transform himself, saving him from evil and leading him to the best
that human life can ever reach, provided he meet the required conditions?

One of the required conditions is faith. Religious faith is giving one­self
in the wholeness of his being, so far as he is able, to what be believes has
the character and power just mentioned. This self-giving requires the purging
of oneself by every means at his command of everything he can discover in
himself which resists the transforming power to which he commits himself.
In theological terms, this purging is called repentance and confession of
sin.

Transformation can occur only in the form of events. The empirical method
is the only possible way to distinguish events and to know what transformation
results from them. Therefore, if the religious problem be as stated, theology
must be empirical. If God is what transforms man as he cannot transform himself,
to save him from self-destructive propensities and lead him to the best that
human life can attain, then a theology which repudiates the empirical method
of inquiry is futile and misleading.

From the beginning I have insisted that religion in great part is one of the
major evils in human life because it is commitment to what men believe will
transform toward the best but this commitment is often given to what in truth
does the opposite. Consequently, religion based on belief not corrected by
empirical inquiry is very likely to be an evil.

A change in my treatment of this religious problem has been gradually developing
through the years. It is a shift of the focus of inquiry from the universe
and from speculation about the power of being, allegedly creating and sustaining
the universe, over to what operates in human life. Increasingly, I am convinced
that religious inquiry is misdirected when some presence pervading the total
cosmos is sought to solve the religious problem. It is even more futile to
search infinite being which transcends the totality of all existence. It is
impossible to gain knowledge of the total cosmos or to have any understanding
of the infinity transcending the cosmos. Consequently, beliefs about these
matters are illusions, cherished for their utility in producing desired states
of mind. Scientific knowledge is not about the universe in its wholeness but
only about some structure selected to fit the demands of the techniques and
theories available to the human mind at any given stage in the development
of scientific thought. What is true of science in this respect is true of
philosophy and theology or any other way in which the human mind might attain
knowledge.

Nothing can transform man unless
it actually operates in hu­man life. Therefore, in human life, in the actual
processes of human existence, must be found the saving and transforming power
which religious inquiry seeks and which faith must apprehend. When religious
inquiry is directed to what operates in human life, and not to a realm beyond
human life, the consequent form of religion is not necessarily the kind of
humanism which claims that man can transform himself by setting up the proper
ideals and devoting himself to desired goals. No man by conscious volition
can change the established organization of his personality at those levels
which are beyond the reach of his own consciousness. If psychopathology has
demonstrated nothing else, it has certainly demonstrated this. Men are driven,
some more and some less, by unconscious propensities which frustrate their
conscious aims and often lead to self‑destruction, to the destruction
of others, or to the disruption of mutual support in social relations.

The conventional religious term
for creative transformation operating beyond the control of conscious volition
to save from evil is grace. We need some such word to designate the fact,
but by itself it gives no information and solves no problem. It only states
that under some conditions men are transformed as they cannot transform themselves,
in such a way as to save them from evil and lead them toward the best The
word tells us nothing about how the transformation operates nor what the required
conditions may be under which it can operate most effectively. Therefore,
unless we have empirical knowledge of what operates in the form of "grace,"
the word can do nothing more than give us the exalted feeling that we are
not as other men because we are the recipients of God's grace. Without empirical
evidence to support the claim, this is nothing but moral arrogance with consequences
which are often deadly.

The revelation of God in Jesus Christ, or in any other way, must inevitably
be in the form of events. Christian faith has always claimed that divine revelation
has been in the form of actual events. As said before, events can be distinguished
in no other way than by sense experience. Therefore Christian theology is
based on sense experience; otherwise it is unfaithful to original Christianity.

Man can have no spiritual experience which does not include sense experience,
because the living organism is always sensing. A prayer is heard with the
sense experience of hearing; it is uttered with the sense experience of uttering;
it is silently medi­tated with the use of language and other symbols derived
origi­nally from sense experience. Without sense experience of sight or hearing
or touch, one can know nothing of the Cross of Christ. When one is deaf and
blind, the powers of the spirit must be awakened by the sense experience of
touch; otherwise they re­main dormant. This we know from the story of Helen
Keller.

Every power of cognition, every power of appreciation, devotion, love, and
aspiration requires sense experience in its be­ginning and in its development;
and it reaches its culmination in some profound perception involving sense
experience so inter­preted as to reach the utmost depth and scope of meaning
as one beholds the symbols which have this meaning. Furthermore there can
be no sense experience without some meaning reach­ing into the past, into
the future, and into the depth of interpretation, no matter how limited all
this may be. The problem of sense experience for religious inquiry and religious
devotion is not to exclude it; the problem is to develop it in such a way
that it calls forth all the creative powers of human life in profound perceptions.
Peter, after hearing the words and seeing the behavior of Jesus, cries: "Thou
art the Christ, the Son of the living God!" This came out of sense, and
without sense experience there is no revelation of God according to the Christian
faith.

I shall now tell of the influences
which have shaped my thinking in a way to develop this kind of empirical theology.

My father was a Presbyterian minister. My mother was a woman of profound piety
and religious devotion. She shaped the religious development of her children,
not by verbal instruction but by the encompassing might of her faith. She
influenced others in the same way. Until she was past eighty, a company of
women, some thirty in number, came regularly to her home for worship and study
every week.

I graduated from Park College which was dominated and shaped by the Christian
tradition, with college church, required daily worship, and many courses in
Bible and religious thought. At Park, Ernest McAffee, teacher of "Comparative
Religions" and son of the founder of the college, and Silas Evans, teacher
of philosophy and college preacher, first awakened me to the urgency of the
intellectual problem involved in the conduct of religious living. I seem to
have come alive under their instruction.

Throughout high school and up to the month of April in my senior year at college,
I was sure that I should be a journalist. My mother's brother was editor of
a small paper, and in that unspoken way of hers my mother's expectations for
me bad become my expectations for myself. But shortly before my gradua­tion,
I came to my room after the evening meal and sat alone looking at the sunset
over the Missouri River. Suddenly it came over me that I should devote my
life to the problems of reli­gious inquiry. I never had a more ecstatic experience.
I could not sleep all night and walked in that ecstasy for several days.

Since that evening in April I have never doubted my vocation. Never once throughout
my life have I doubted the reality of God, whatever the revolutionary changes
in my ideas about what, in truth, does have the character and power to transform
man after the manner indicated. These changes in my religious thinking never
dimmed my awareness of the reality that man is subject to transformation from
the worse to the better in ways which be cannot himself determine, except
in the sense of meet­ing certain required conditions.

I distinguish two levels in the self‑giving of faith. At one level,
commitment is guided by the ideas which one happens to have at the time concerning
what transforms man creatively. But there is a deeper level of commitment.
At this second level, one is motivated by the intention to give himself, in
the wholeness of his being so far as he is able, to what in truth does save
and transform, no matter how different it may be from one's ideas about it.

If one cannot distinguish between his own ideas and what his ideas seek to
apprehend, he is unfit for religious inquiry and also for every other kind
of inquiry. Religious thinking is existential, engaging the total self. It
becomes neurotic if it binds one to a given set of ideas. It is liberating
and creative if the existential engagement is given to what actually saves
and not to one's ideas about it, the ideas being constantly subject to correction.
With this creative and liberating commitment, one can view his ideas critically,
because a deeper commitment delivers him from bond­age to them. This deeper
commitment is to the actuality and not merely to ideas about it.
The decision made in April of my senior year in college did not point to the
parish ministry, but it did require that I go to a graduate school to study
the religious problem. At that time I knew of no such place except the theological
seminaries. I spent three years at the San Francisco Seminary (Presbyterian),
and on graduation was awarded a traveling fellowship giving me a year in Germany.
I chose Jena because Rudolf Eucken at that time was most widely acclaimed
for his work in the philosophy of religion, having won a Nobel Prize. During
the second half of the school year in Germany I went to Heidelberg and studied
under Windelband and Troeltsch.
During these years I was gathering ideas and doubtless was undergoing some
kind of development, but I was not aware of any further insight changing the
structure of my thought.

On returning to the United States I spent four years in the pastorate, most
of the time at Davis, California, where the State Farm School of the University
of California had recently been located. My interest in the work there was
with the students attending the school. But I soon found that one cannot effec­tively
reach college students unless one is himself a part of their institution,
so in 1915 I left for Harvard to study not in the Divinity School but in the
Department of Philosophy. Harvard was the most intellectually transforming
experience of my life up to that time. It opened up wide, free ranges of thought.

I should say that while yet in Davis I read Bergson and found him exciting.
(Ever since those days of private study my thinking has been deeply influenced
by Bergson's idea of creativity, al­though my interpretation is different
from his.) He gave to my thinking a direction which deflected the influences
of Harvard and caused me to reinterpret my teachers as I would not other­wise
have done.
At Harvard the two men who influenced me most were Ernest Hocking and Ralph
Barton Perry. Santayana had departed, Whitehead had not arrived, and Royce
died during the summer after my first year in the graduate school. I had been
introduced to the philosophy of Josiah Royce at Park College when my teacher
Silas Evans spent an entire course interpreting The World and the Individual.
In Hocking, whose religious thinking has become an enduring part of my life,
I found another devoted follower of Royce. But Bergson had already intervened
to turn me away from the metaphysics of idealism, and Hocking him­self was
carrying further the changes initiated by Royce whereby idealism was becoming
increasingly a kind of interpersonal creativity. This is the direction in
which I myself had been moving, to the point where my idea of creative interchange
can no longer be called idealism in the sense that Hegel intended.

Ralph Barton Perry introduced me to the problem of value as philosophically
treated. This problem has been a central concern of mine ever since, although
I have departed from Perry's treatment of it, or rather extended his interpretation
of value into areas and forms which he does not recognize, so far as I can
discover. I do not see how any penetrating and effective understanding of
religion, morality, or human nature and destiny can ignore the problem of
value.

While at Harvard I became acquainted with the work of John Dewey and found
him highly stimulating. His influence is also an abiding part of my thought.
Dewey caused me to see something I have never forgotten; Inquiry concerning
what makes for the good and evil of human life must be directed to what actually
and observably operates in human life. Otherwise, the inquiry will produce
misleading illusions. The following state­ments indicate the impact of John
Dewey upon my thinking.

The transcendent, the supernatural, the ineffable, the infinite, the absolute
being itself, and other such ideas inevitably lead inquiry astray unless they
can be identified with something which observably operates in human life.
What is observed is not necessarily identical with what enters immediately
into sense experience. Rather, what we observe is what we infer from sense
experience by predicting specific consequences and observing or failing to
observe under required conditions what was predicted. Perception, including
sense experience, can engage the total personality with all its resources
of inquiry‑intuition, inference, wonder, meditation, speculation, faith,
love, aspiration. Perception always involves sense experience. But profound
perception brings into action every means and every power by which knowledge
is attained. It is a gross misunderstanding to say that sense experience can
give us only knowledge of sense experience.

Whitehead was the next great thinker I encountered. Whitehead does not apply
the term God to the creativity which operates in human life. He reserves the
holy name for designating the primordial order which is changeless Being.
But analysis of his thought seems to indicate that the primordial order can
be called God only because the process which creates us and all the good which
human life can ever attain does, in truth, conform to the primordial order.
In such case, the primordial order is God only because it renders the process
of existence progressively creative, when required conditions are present.
The primordial order is not outside of the creativity which operates in human
life to create, sustain, save, and transform. Rather, the primordial order
is an ingredient in the creativity, in such manner that without the primordial
order there would be no creativity.

Whether or not this statement about Whitehead's thought is what Whitehead
himself intended to say, this is the line of thinking I developed in consequence
of long study of his writing. Doubtless Whitehead would emphasize more than
I do the realm of eternal possibilities allegedly ordered by the primordial
order. This is a cosmic speculation about which it is difficult to get evi­dence.
In any case religious seeking must not be led astray from its primary problem
and responsibility. Religious inquiry seeks to know what operates in human
life here and how to save from stagnation, perversion, and destruction, and
to transform toward the best to be attained. If this problem is solved, the
eternal possibilities, if any, will take care of themselves. Man in exist­ence
is the religious problem, not the cosmos and not eternal being except as these
enter into man's existence. Furthermore, since all existence is process, the
religious problem is man and the processes which create and destroy, save
and pervert, liberate and bind.

Another potent influence in my
thinking had been the analysis of language and symbols generally, with the
various kinds of meaning which symbols convey. The interpretation of symbols
has become a massive movement in philosophy and theology. My first book, published
in 1926, was written under the influence of this movement as it was developing
into its modern form. More recent work in this field by George Herbert Mead,
Charles Morris, and others has turned my thought increasingly to this problem.
Paul Tillich has been a powerful influence, leading theologians to interpret
theology in terms of the religious symbol. I have learned much from the profound
and clarifying insights of Tillich. But his theology is based upon what I
consider a misunderstanding of the religious symbol. I am convinced that his
use of it is leading religious thought into another of those aberrations from
which it must return after futile wanderings to find the path of truth. Perhaps
the best way to show bow I have been influenced by the study of symbolism
is to state my criticism of Tillich, who is the leading representative of
this movement in theology.

The religious symbol, according to Tillich, is not cognitive, if cognition
means the use of words to designate or describe some structure in existence
or possibility. Scientific language is cognitive but the religious symbol
is not. It is not because, says Tillich, it points beyond the reach of knowledge
to the infinite depth and power of being. The power of being cannot be confined
to any form in existence or possibility. Therefore the power of being is unknowable;
it is the ultimate mystery. Yet religious symbols point to it and presumably
can awaken in us a qualitative experience of it.

When it is said that God is love, the word love in Tillich's theology is used
as a religious symbol. It does not mean that the form of thought, feeling,
and action in our experience which we call love applies to God. God is not
love in that sense. The same is true of justice or any other term applied
to the power of being. Even the word God, when it brings to mind a being having
the characteristics with which God is conceived in Christian or other religious
tradition, is a religious symbol. There is no such being beyond this construction
of the human imagination. But this imagined construction points beyond itself
to the power of being.

The inconceivable power of being is the "God beyond God." This expression,
frequently used by Tillich, means that only the power of being and it alone
can meet the demands of that "ultimate concern" which drives man
to religion. According to Tillich, man's ultimate concern is to overcome non‑being.
"Non­being" refers to all the limitations and frustrations of our
existence, such as death, guilt, rejection, and (most characteristic of modern
man) meaninglessness. This last term refers to what is expressed when a man
asks: What's the use of it all? What makes life worth living? Why all this
striving and suffering, ending in death? We can suppress these thoughts, but
when we dare to let them reach our awareness, we have the feeling that we
are merely waiting for death and that is all there is to it. This is the experience
which goes by the name of meaninglessness. Seeking to overcome this, together
with other forms of non-being, is religion, according to Tillich.Therefore,
says Tillich, if "God" refers to what enables man to overcome non-being
in its various forms, it must refer beyond the traditional idea of God to
the power of being itself, because this and nothing else can overcome non-being.
Being itself is infinite and eternal.

No matter what happens, no matter what
is destroyed, whatever remains will still be an instance of being and a manifestation
of the power of being. So, says Tillich, what is ultimately sought in religious
faith can be nothing else than the power of being, since it alone can overcome
non-being. It alone can give us the "courage to be."

This sounds very plausible until one examines what is truly involved beyond
the exalted feeling generated by the words being and power of being. Being
itself, or the power of being, is infinite and indestructible only in the
sense that when everything else is destroyed, whatever continues will still
be. Everything conceivable might be destroyed, leaving what we cannot conceive.
What we cannot conceive would still be an instance of being. The slow torture
of the human race to the point of extinction would still manifest the power
of being.

This is the only kind of indestructibility which being itself or the power
of being can provide, so long as it is not limited to some form standing in
opposition to other forms. But this is exactly what Tillich means by "power
of being." The eternity of being itself is nothing more than the certainty
that something will be when life and virtue have ceased to exist. No matter
what comes into existence in the form of horror and "nothing­ness,"
through it all the power of being will still be the power of being. This and
nothing more is what we have when we cast ourselves upon the infinity of being
to be saved.

I am deeply appreciative of the contributions Tillich has made to religious
thought in analyzing man's predicament. My negative criticism has been entirely
directed upon errors arising from his ontology, which in turn is based upon
his interpretation and use of religious symbols. According to him, the religious
symbol points beyond all structure to the infinite depths of being. There­fore,
it points to the ultimate mystery of being, beyond all possibility of making
cognitive distinctions. I have tried to show the disastrous consequences for
religious faith when subjected to the guidance of religious symbols interpreted
and used in this way.I
agree with Tillich in saying that the non-cognitive symbol is indispensable
in the conduct of human life and especially in religion. But its function
is not to point to the depths where no structure can be found and no distinctions
made. Rather, it has another function of supreme importance.

In opposition to Tillich, I must briefly explain what I mean by the proper
use of non-cognitive symbols. The expression "darling" addressed
to a child is a non-cognitive symbol. It does not describe nor designate that
form of existence which distin­guishes the child from other forms of existence.
Rather, it refers to the total, unique individuality of the child. This individuality
can never be reduced to the structures which the mind can know. We can know
that the child is two years old, that he pronounces his words in a certain
way, that he is dark, etc. An infinity of structures might be known about
the child if we were omniscient. But all this generalization about the child
would never give us the immediate experience of his unique individuality which
is what we love. To express and to awaken this immediate experience of the
individuality, we must use the non­cognitive symbol. What we love is the unique
individuality to which all these structures apply cognitively. But this individu­ality
is more than the structure which the individual has in common with other beings
of like sort. Qualities of feeling and sense immediately experienced are our
apprehension of this unique individual. But these qualities cannot be described
in their immediacy. Only the structures pertaining to them can be known by
way of cognitive symbols. To awaken the experience of love or other qualities
by which we apprehend the unique individual, we must use non-cognitive symbols.

What is said here about the beloved
child can also be said about any particular, unique, existing kind of being,
whether it be a person, a tree, a rock, my native land, a period of history,
anything which is a unique form of existence. The qualities we experience
in the particular form of existence may not be those of love. They may be
the qualities of fear, boredom, ecstasy, or what have you. These words "love,"
"fear," and the like are cognitive symbols because they refer to
the structure of the experience. They do not give us the qualities of the
experience because we do not ordinarily have the experience of fear or of
affection or boredom when we use these words. The non-cognitive symbol is
required to awaken the qualities of the experience.

Fine art is the most common form of
the non-cognitive symbol. A song or poem which is a lyrical cry expressing
love, fear, horror is an example. These awaken the qualities we experience
in the con­crete fullness of being, whether or not they also inform us of
the structure which contains these qualities.

This brings the argument to the point where I can state my agreement and disagreement
with Tillich concerning the non­cognitive symbol. I agree that human life
cannot be sustained at the human level without a large use of the non‑cognitive
symbol. Especially is this true where beauty, love, devotion, and loyalty
are involved. Only the non-cognitive symbol can awaken, express, vivify, and
intensify that experience of quality which is the actual content of any existing
thing. But all existing things having these qualities also have structures
by which they can be known and described, and by which action can be guided
in dealing with them.

Now all this applies to the non‑cognitive religious symbol. Tillich
says that the religious symbol points to what transcends all structure and
therefore all possible knowledge. So, says Tillich, God does not exist because
existence involves some limiting form, otherwise called structure. I hold
to the contrary: God does exist. I agree that the non‑cognitive religious
symbol is indispensable to the conduct of the religious life, even as it is
indispensable to love, devotion, and much else in human existence. I agree
that the religious symbol used in this way does not give us knowledge, because
it has a function other than cognition: namely, to awaken, deepen, and magnify
our experience of the qualities which enter into the existence of what commands
our religious faith. But what commands our faith also has a structure by which
it can be known and distinguished from other kinds of being. To know this
structure we must have cognitive symbols.

In opposition to Tillich, I contend that God is not the unknowable mystery.
Certainly, mystery is everywhere, although the word mystery has many meanings.
If by mystery one means the unknowable, and if the knowable is limited to
distinguishing structures, while the unknowable refers to the immediately
experienced qualities pertaining to particular existing beings, then these
qualities are the mystery pertaining to all existence and also pertaining
to God. But this is not the same as saying that God has no knowable structure
whatsoever. This is my basic point of disagreement with Tillich.

This critical comment on Tillich is the only way I have of showing how I have
been influenced by him and by the wide­spread movement in religious thinking
which emphasizes the religious symbol as having a function other than conveying
knowledge, when knowledge means to distinguish and describe. Under the influence
of Tillich and others, I have in recent years come to appreciate the place
and the importance of the non-cognitive symbol beyond the scope of my earlier
thinking. But I am convinced that Tillich's use of the religious symbol will
lead to disaster if not corrected.

Karl Barth has also been a strong influence. Yet I am very far from being
a Barthian. Therefore, to show the way in which my thought has been shaped
by him. I must state my criticism of his theology.Barth
and Tillich stand in extreme opposition to one another on many points. Bart's
theology is based on concrete, particular events, or on what he believes to
be such. Tillich's theology is based on an ontology which infinitely transcends
everything in existence. Consequently, for Tillich, nothing in existence can
be identified with God. Barth declares repeatedly that God exists and works
in time and space; that God is not supra‑historical but is historical.
Tillich just as emphatically reiterates that all events--hence, all existence--is
"fallen," is infected with evil in the form of the "existential
predicament."

Therefore, says Tillich, to say that
God exists is to represent something to be God which cannot possibly be divine.
To say that God exists approaches blasphemy, says Tillich. This "blasphemy"
is the heart and substance of Barth's theology. Tillich says that theological
language must be symbolic in the sense that I have just been explaining. Barth
insists that theological language must be literal and cognitively descriptive
of the actual events in which God is revealed. It is nonsense, says Tillich,
to think that a man can be God. Barth reiterates many times that it is literally
true to say that Jesus Christ is God, "a man who is God and God who is
also man." He writes: "In Jesus Christ we have to do with God Himself,
with God the Creator, who became a creature, who existed as a creature in
time and space, here, there, at that time, just as we all exist." In
opposition to this, Tillich writes that Jesus as the Christ reveals God only
because the man is transparent, so that through his human existence we can
see (apprehend) the power of being which is not limited to any form of existence
and most certainly cannot be a man.

Tillich holds that the revelation of God comes to us through the New Testament
in the form of a picture painted of the man Jesus. This picture, like all
great works of art, reveals not the existing object (in this case the man
Jesus); rather it conceals the actual man in order to give us through the
picture the vision of the New Being. In opposition to this, Barth writes:
". . .everything will depend upon the Christians' not painting for non­Christians
in word and deed a picture of the Lord or an idea of Christ, but in their
succeeding with human words and ideas in pointing to Christ himself."

I side with Barth and against Tillich
in identifying God with actual events. I agree with Barth in saying that God
exists in time and space; that God is historical and not supra-historical;
that God was actually in Jesus Christ in the form of actual events of creative
interchange whereby men are transformed creatively and savingly.

Barth writes that no man can meet with God in the Bible or in Jesus Christ
unless God takes the initiative and gives to the indi­vidual the "freedom"
to know and believe the truth. With this also I agree in the sense that no
man can know the living pres­ence of God in the saving power of creativity
unless this very creativity generates in him the insight by which this can
be known.

While I agree with Barth on all these points and others, I specify the kind
of events in Jesus Christ and the continued events through history which are
identical with the living God. Barth does not do this, other than to say that
the man Jesus Christ is God. This ignores all the distinctions which must
be made to render the revelation intelligible. Furthermore, there is in Barth
a dogmatism and a repudiation of logical coherence which render his theology
impossible, as I see it. The truth about God no man can believe, says Barth,
unless a special gift from God enables him to believe. The truth about God
as set forth by Barth is beyond the reach of all the powers of human knowledge.
Only by a special gift from God can one believe and know it. This truth cannot
be found in holy scriptures unless God has given you the freedom to know and
believe. Since the ordinary tests distinguishing true and false do not apply,
the only way to know if one has the truth given of God is to find out if one
agrees with Karl Barth.

It may be true that all those who disagree
with Barth have not been chosen by God to receive the divine gift of freedom
to believe the truth revealed in God's Word. If we accept the theology of
Karl Barth, this must be the case. For the moment I am not disputing that
point. I wish only to state what this entails. If the truth of God's revelation
in Holy Scripture is, as Barth says, "inaccessible and inconceivable"
to those who study the Bible devotedly and persistently with endowments equal
to those of Barth, then the Bible is not the source from which the truth can
be derived. Neither can this truth be had from Jesus Christ, the prophets
and apostles, as recorded in the Bible. If Barth is right, the only agency
enabling one to gain this truth is the special act of God bestowed upon a
few; and these few are chosen by God without regard for intellectual ability,
scholarship, or other natural endowment. Barth admits that this is a miracle
of God's gracious love. The whole thing comes down to this: if you believe
Karl Barth's exposition of God's revealed truth, you are assured that you
have received God's gift of "freedom to believe." Otherwise, you
are one of those for whom the truth is "inaccessible and inconceivable."

This conclusion is further corroborated by what Barth says about "freedom
to believe." It is freedom to believe against all that contradicts the
belief. He writes: "The glory of faith . . . is . . . that the believer
in God's Word may bold on to the Word in everything, in spite of all that
contradicts it." When the special gift from God is the freedom to believe
in disregard of contrary evidence and despite contradiction, it is plain that
there is no way to distinguish what is true and what is false in God's revelation,
except by the teaching of Karl Barth. The Bible cannot inform us, because
the truth of revelation is inaccessible and inconceivable without freedom
to believe, miraculously given to us by God; and this belief must be held
even when contradicted by evidence from science, philosophy, and common sense.

On page eleven of Dogmatics in
Outline, Barth admits that dogmatics is liable to error. But how can anyone
detect what is error and what is truth if all the ordinary tests are repudiated
save only the freedom to believe given of God? Also, does Barth mean to say
that be may be in error when be says that Jesus Christ is God, with all the
many other statements which be de­rives from this affirmation? I do not believe
that he would admit liability to error on this doctrine.

Barth says that Christian faith does not repudiate reason. But he goes on
immediately to say that Christian faith is concerned not merely with reason
but with "an illumination of reason . . . He [God] cannot be known by
the powers of human knowledge. . . . What man can know by his own power according
to the measure of his natural powers . . . has nothing to do with God."

From all this, it is apparent that when Barth speaks of "reason"
in theology he does not mean what the word ordinarily designates: namely,
man's natural powers for achieving knowledge. Rather, he means a special kind
of reason, called "an illumination of reason." This illumination
must come directly from God as a special gift granted only to a few, Barth
himself being one of these few. Faith, says Barth, is "thoroughly logical,"
and is "a truth of facts." But this faith which is "thoroughly
logical" is a belief involving contradictory statements. Also, the "facts"
are "inaccessible and inconceivable" to the natural powers of the
human mind.

Barth states his views as being
not merely his own but those of original Christianity. Tillich calmly states
the opposite view as being original Christianity. Harnack and Ritschl also
state the views of original Christianity, but they do not agree with either
Barth or Tillich. Such being the case, it cannot be that all these men rightly
affirm the faith of original Christianity. Rather, what each proclaims is
his own personal faith derived from a Christian tradition which has been changing
for practice of identifying one's personal faith with original Christianity
and with "biblical faith" seems to give unquestionable authority
to the pronouncements made. But the authority is false because men of equal
scholarship, making the same claim, disagree radically.

This intellectual autobiography
has said relatively little about personal connections with individuals, groups,
books, institutions, social situations, and historical developments. My religious
thinking, as I see it, can best be traced by examining the problem on which
I have been working and explaining what I have done with it.

I am deeply indebted to the theological
thinking with which I disagree so radically, and I shall always be grateful
for what it has taught me. Above all, I am grateful to those of my students
and others who have supported me in the line of inquiry which I have followed.